I have a question for all the male readers - do you take your
trousers/underwear all the way down before you pee? If you do, then odds
are good that it was Pepe the Frog who taught you to do so. Feels good man. A key character in Matt Furie's Boy's Club comics, Pepe has since become one of the most affable, endearing memes on the market.

That was until recently, when the poor, undeserving frog was kidnapped
by the far right. R9k, the infamous 4Chan forum which was directly
connect to Elliot Rodger,
started mutating Pepe into a symbol for antisemitism. This was,
supposedly, part of a wider scheme to reclaim Pepe from the 'normies'
before the meme became too mainstream to be valid anymore. Our
happy-go-luck stoner frog had been turned into a nasty, racist toad, to
the point where the Anti-Defamation League officially declared him a
hate symbol.

As you might expect, that didn't sit too well with Pepe's creator, who
is now working directly with the ADL to claim Pepe back from the
alt-right. Together, Matt Furie and the ADL have started a social media
campaign; Furie will create a slew of positive, equality-promotion Pepe
material, which the ADL will then promote on their channels under the
#SavePepe banner.

Furie is also due to speak at the annual ADL 'Never is Now' summit in
NYC. The opening salvo of the campaign was a strip entitled 'Too Sleep, Perchance to Meme',
which is essentially a visual representation of Pepe's slow,
excruciating corruption. There's nothing particularly funny or even
remotely cute about it, but it sure as hell gets the point across.

If the campaign fully succeeds, Pepe might even end up getting removed
from the hate symbol database, but even if he doesn't, this will make
enough noise to remove any notion that Pepe ever willingly turned to the
dark side side. In a broader context, this could set a precedent for
how to deal with racist behaviour online, and a reminder that meme-based
humour should never set out to hurt anyone.